Hello,
I just checked the difficulty and it seems to increase a lot lately.
What is the reason behind this?
At this rate and if the price doesn't increase an s9 will not be much profitable by the summer....
I'm struggling whether I should invest in a dozen of S9 but things are not so motivating now compare to sept/oct when i first look into it.
Thanks for your insights.
We can all agree on one thing, everybody and their mother is talking about mining, and it will only be EXPONENTIALLY increasing from here. Current mining difficulty is 2.2 Trillion, and it went up 1 trillion from exactly 3 months ago. So If I was to predict the difficulty rate by end of 2018, considering the exponential factor. I would do it like this:
Apr 20th - 2.2+1.5=3.7 Trillion
Jul 20th - 3.7+2=5.7 Trillion
Oct 20th - 5.7+2.5=8.2 Trillion
Jan 20th - 8.2+3=11.2 Trillion
This makes the average difficulty for the 12 months at 6.7 Trillion.
Being optimistic about bitcoins price, we can say that it's 12 month average will be $30k. After $150 in electricity costs, that will leave us with with an average monthly profit of $300 per month per S9 from now until January 20th, 2019. That is my prediction. Any thoughts?
What bitcoin/usd exchange rate will do is anybodies guess, could be $30k, could be $3k. Impossible to predict.
It's best to just think in BTC only.
Difficulty appears to be growing faster than your estimates above though, and it's better to just look at the total network hashrate, not difficulty if you want to forecast BTC earnings. Difficulty is there to ensure 1 block gets mined on average every 10 minutes, that's it.
How much hashing power you have vs. the total network hashing power is what determines the size of your slice of the pie.
Anyway, it doesn't matter too much as difficulty follows hashrate.
But, regarding your estimate, network hashing power growth is accelerating. It's truly exponential.
the network hashrate is now doubling every 2 months.